At first we wondered:  will anyone show up at 8am for our session at the Skoll World Forum? Luckily, they did… likely due to our promises of the provision of chocolate and due to the creative use of bright colored flyers handwritten with messages such as:

“Can you afford a mosquito net?”

and

“SEX (education) DRUGS (to cure malaria) and ROCK & ROLL (Acumen Fellows)”

All strategically placed around town, in Oxford’s business school’s bathroom stalls (captive audience!), and passed around throughout the conference.

The discussion focused on three challenging themes:  marketing, pricing and operations for scaling.  We shared what each of us has been learning by working with Acumen Fund’s social ventures creating goods and services for the poor in the areas of health, water, housing and energy.  In pricing, we struggled with the challenges of whether subsidies are effective in the long run and most models examined found that some form of subsidy (at least in healthcare) was necessary to address pressing health problems.  In marketing we found that traditional methods are simply not working.  Medicine Shoppe in India, for example, was well branded with clean signs in English in poor areas.  This intimidated some of the people in this community and prevented them from coming into the store for fear it would be too expensive for them.  Instead, Medicine Shoppe went door to door telling the community about its free health clinic services and new pharmacy, which worked much better.  In operations, strong supply chain systems and MIS systems were the key to effective management when scaling.

Greg Dees, pioneer academic in the field of social entrepreneurship, asked us a good question:  What is our definition of “market-based solutions” to address problems of the poor?  Do we consider models that are just cost recovery for the enterprise or profit- maximizing?  I will blog a much longer post on this in the next month, but I will leave that to the readers…what is your definition of market-based solutions?

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